Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis promised that if elected there would be a “reckoning” for medical “elites” who were “wrong or lied” to justify the country’s lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“This whole thing is a total medical swamp right now, and it needs to be drained,” DeSantis said during a town hall forum on medical issues at Manchester’s McIntyre Ski Area Wednesday afternoon.
DeSantis’s opening act was Florida surgeon general Dr. Joseph Ladapo, who drew national derision from the medical establishment for opposing some vaccine and mask mandates, questioning the safety of COVID-19 vaccines and at times being at odds with professional medical organizations.
Ladapo described how the medical “elite” pilloried him for his views.
“I started writing and had been a popular, successful professor at UCLA. Then I quickly became a very unpopular professor at UCLA,” Ladapo said.
“This was all created by the terrible, inhumane policies that leaders of this country and literally every single state minus one — Florida — that were following these recommendations that just didn’t make sense.”
Ladapo said he was stunned when DeSantiss’ staff asked him to interview for the state’s vacant surgeon general position.
“It was very clear to me that was a man who was willing to do what was right despite the opposition,” said Ladapo, who said he left a safe research job at UCLA for what he called “the gamble with a capital ‘G,’” becoming DeSantis’s point person on public health.
“He was taking so much flak and here he was, literally the only person in the country in a position of real leadership, real power, who was calling out the badness.”
A different COVID stance
DeSantis said Ladapo was the first state health officer in the country to recommend against children under 6 months getting the COVID-19 shot.
Last month, Ladapo warned against anyone under 65 getting a COVID-19 booster.
Ladapo, a native of Nigeria and self-described sexual abuse survivor, completed medical school and earned a doctorate in health policy at Harvard. He worked at several New York City hospitals before getting tenure at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine.
“If you look at the elites and what they said about COVID-19, on every key inflection point they got it wrong. They were either wrong or they lied,” DeSantis said.
DeSantis and his campaign believe that like his military service, his pushback against the National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control and retired presidential adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci set him apart in this crowded GOP field.
“This is what made him famous,” said one New Hampshire campaign aide, who spoke on the condition he not be identified.
DeSantis is the only GOP candidate who served in the military. He enlisted in the U.S. Navy, earned a Bronze Star and became a lawyer attached to a Navy Seal commander in Iraq.
A New Hampshire Democratic Party spokesperson said DeSantis is only reminding New Hampshire voters how out of the mainstream he is.
“As governor, Ron DeSantis has used his power to push dangerous anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, sowing distrust in lifesaving medical treatments while COVID deaths skyrocketed in Florida,” Aida Ross said in a statement. “DeSantis is just repeating his same dangerous political games with people’s lives in New Hampshire today.”
Ladapo said he met with former President Donald Trump, for whom Fauci worked.
“I have nothing against Mr. Trump, but there is no one else running in this election (but DeSantis) who has the qualities necessary to run this country, the integrity, the courage and the intelligence,” Ladapo said.
Feds ‘muffed this’
In December 2022, DeSantis petitioned to have a Florida grand jury examine the “crimes and wrongs” related to vaccines and public health enforcement methods.
“Here’s the thing: You can’t have elites in society perform this poorly this consistently and there not be any accountability for it,” DeSantis said.
“If there is not accountability, they are going to try to do this again.”
DeSantis proposed term limits for federal bureaucrats, citing the example of Fauci, who joined the National Institutes of Health during Richard Nixon’s presidency in the late 1960s.
“It is one thing if you make a judgment call, but another when the data is clear and yet you refuse to change course,” DeSantis said about Fauci.
State Rep. Jess Edwards, R-Auburn, asked about federal and state public health advice that “otherwise healthy” children should get another round of COVID-19 vaccines this winter.
“We have a new technology, you shouldn’t be putting experimental stuff into healthy kids,” Ladapo said to cheers from the audience, which included many anti-vaccine activists.
DeSantis said the country is ready for an aggressive check on the power of federal agencies to promote vaccines that DeSantis charged were based on “flimsy” studies.
“We know the federal government muffed this in so many ways. We need a reckoning and we are going to get one,” DeSantis vowed.
DeSantis sharply criticized a proposed World Health Organization preparedness model for all countries facing future pandemics.
“They are proposing and what Biden wants to do is a global pandemic treaty; it’s really a lockdown treaty,” DeSantis said.
